Primary Scriptures on Venting
Psa 141:3 Set a watch, Yahweh, before my mouth. Keep the door of my lips.
Pro 29:11 A fool vents all of his anger, but a wise man brings himself under control.

Additional Scriptures
Exo_34:6 Yahweh passed by before him, and proclaimed, “Yahweh! Yahweh, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth,
Num_14:18 ‘Yahweh is slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness, forgiving iniquity and disobedience; and he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and on the fourth generation.’
Joe_2:13 Tear your heart, and not your garments, and turn to Yahweh, your God; for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness, and relents from sending calamity.
Jon_4:2 He prayed to Yahweh, and said, “Please, Yahweh, wasn’t this what I said when I was still in my own country? Therefore I hurried to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness, and you relent of doing harm.
Nah_1:3 Yahweh is slow to anger, and great in power, and will by no means leave the guilty unpunished. Yahweh has his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet.
Psa_86:15 But you, Lord, are a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth.
Psa_103:8 Yahweh is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness.
Psa_145:8 Yahweh is gracious, merciful, slow to anger, and of great loving kindness.
Pro_14:29 He who is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a quick temper displays folly.
Pro_15:18 A wrathful man stirs up contention, but one who is slow to anger appeases strife.
Pro_16:32 One who is slow to anger is better than the mighty; one who rules his spirit, than he who takes a city.
Pro_19:11 The discretion of a man makes him slow to anger. It is his glory to overlook an offense.
Neh_9:17 and refused to obey. They weren’t mindful of your wonders that you did among them, but hardened their neck, and in their rebellion appointed a captain to return to their bondage. But you are a God ready to pardon, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness, and didn’t forsake them.
Jas_1:19 So, then, my beloved brothers, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger;

Have you ever become a fool by going bezerk? In my case I have a habit of holding in all my feelings until I explode, usually in front of my wife. I tend to hold in my feelings because I try to be slow of anger; but sometimes this backfires on me. My counselor says I need to vent to another person, that is to have a safe place to voice my emotions, without condemnation or criticism. If I tell my wife, "This is how I feel about something," she is to say, "Yes, dear," not "Why would you feel that way? That's not what I said, anyway, and it's not what I meant."

So they key to watching my words and correctly venting each day is in a controlled environment, so as to bring oneself under control and not get your buttons pushed and not to explode.

All Scriptures are taken from the World English Bible, a modern English translation in the public domain.

Happy Chinese New Year! My old pastor Brother Tommy Nelson urges the 14 to 25 percent of his congregation who actually want to follow Jesus with all their hearts, to not stop reading Revelation, the last book of the Bible, sometimes called the Apocalypse. One of my former Bible teachers, Brother Bernard Bourque, actually memorized the whole book of Revelation in the New International Version (old edition) and reads 13 chapters of the Bible per day, for his personal edification. You see, he reads a lot of Bible. I read the NIV once, cover to cover, word for word, including the genealogies, not as quickly, but now I'm working on reading the World English Bible, the New English Translation, and La Sankta Biblio in a non-English language called Esperanto. My wife, Sister Triphina, thinks it is a lack of faith on my part to say anything negative about myself, but I read it very slowly. I talked to her about that on the way to church and she says I don't have a reading disability, like I think I may have, and she said she never said I lacked faith. Not to say Jesus will not change any disability I may have right now forevermore. Anyway, my mother, Sister Phyllis, was concerned, and sent me to Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics when I was in high school, but I still prefer to read slowly, because I understand more that way. As it was, I managed to graduate from college without making it all the way through maybe a handful of textbooks, and I was absolutely appalled at how much reading was assigned in my first graduate class. Let's just say I never managed to get a master's degree, as of yet. Today I started reading Revelation again, but I'm reading it backwards, starting at Revelation chapter 22. I think I will memorize verse 12 in the World English Bible version, which is a good KEY VERSE for the chapter, in my opinion. It says, (rv 22 12 WEB) “Behold, I come quickly. My reward is with me, to repay to each man according to his work." This is what Jesus said. My two-letter abbreviation for Revelation is "rv". Brother Tommy says for us (you the reader included, not just clergy) to read Revelation so we know we win! So I just wanted to encourage you today. Verse 14 says, "Blessed are those who do his commandments, that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city." The tree of life will be inside the city of New Jerusalem which will come down from the new heaven to land on the new earth, and its leaves are for the healing of the nations. This old earth and anything that God doesn't want to keep from the current old heaven will someday end. If you have read the last page of Fahrenheit 451, you've read some of this before. I don't know if this is true, but somewhere I read that the old Soviet Union cut out the first 3 and last 3 chapters of the Bible before allowing it to be sold it in an atheistic bookstore. Why not read those 6 chapters for a good background of the Bible? You can ask me, if you have any questions.

Talk about drama. You say, “This is my worst nightmare! I knew this would happen!” I've said the same sometimes myself. Let's take a look at Exodus for encouragement.

2012.01.31.
The Torah reading for this coming Saturday, all over the world among Jews is Exodus 13:17-17:16 or Beshalach.

Right off, we learn three lessons in this passage:

1.) God knows what events will be too difficult on us and steers us away from them, even if we are unaware that he did that.

2.) God is actually concerned with the degree of our comfort.

3.) God's agenda might not exactly match ours, and he does his own thing for his own reasons, even though he still takes care of us and even if we are momentarily terrified by life's events.

In this true story, Moses has lead the children of Israel out of Egypt. They are a new people or nation escaping from Egypt, that grew from the family of Israel, which was Israel's second name, though he was first named Jacob. The tribes of Israel go into the wilderness, across from the continent of Africa to Asia by a dry land bridge. Along the way they were chased by all the chariots of Egypt, ran out of water twice, ran out of bread, ran out of meat, and were attacked by the Amalekites, all within a couple of months.

Exodus 14:11 to 12 sums up the Israelites' frustration:
They said to Moses, “Because there were no graves in Egypt, have you taken us away to die in the wilderness? Why have you treated us this way, to bring us out of Egypt? Isn’t this the word that we spoke to you in Egypt, saying, ‘Leave us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians?’ For it were better for us to serve the Egyptians, than that we should die in the wilderness.”

However, they did not die in the wilderness. At each crisis, God gave a solution. They tried to tell Moses it would have been better for them to stay in Egypt. We all love our comfort zone, even when we are enslaved to some terrible conditions, as the Israelites were as slaves in Egypt before God emancipated them. In so many words, they did their best to tell Moses, who actually got their marching orders from God, "We told you so!" But it turned out it just wasn't so, and their complaint never happened, because God had an agenda.

God told Moses his agenda for the Israelite tribes at that time in Exodus 14:3-4, saying:
“Pharaoh will say of the children of Israel, ‘They are entangled in the land. The wilderness has shut them in.’ I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and he will follow after them; and I will get honor over Pharaoh, and over all his armies; and the Egyptians shall know that I am Yahweh.”

Maybe God wants us to know he is the Lord, too, and just how powerful he is, whether on land or sea or in the sky and space.

The tribes of Israel thought they were cornered, backed up against the sea, just south of what is present-day Suez Canal. God provided a land bridge through the sea by blowing a strong wind. Some divers has filmed underwater shapes along a ridge almost to the surface of the water that look like chariot wheels, though the wood wheels have been replace by sea life.

The tribes of Israel thought they had only bitter water to drink while they were in Marah in the wilderness of Shur, but God made the bitter water pure water.

Fourty-five days out, between Elim and Sinai in a land appropriately named Sin, they thought they would die of hunger. They said to Moses, “We wish that we had died by the hand of Yahweh in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots, when we ate our fill of bread, for you have brought us out into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” But God made angel food or heavenly bread, which they called Manna, fall from the sky six out of seven days.

The Manna wasn't that bad to eat, but they thought they would never taste meat again; but God made quail flap all over them from the sky until they got sick of quail and never wanted to see quail again.

2011.12.31:

Sabbath portion from the first book of Moses,
Genesis 44:18 to 47:27 or Vayigash.

Do you ever get to those dead end situations where there seems to be no way out? Do you ever find it hard to communicate with a seemingly harsh boss or government official, so that you are hardly brave enough to get out a word without being lashed out at?

My focus is to exhort away from wrong living toward holy living.

In this passage Josesh, who became a third-culture kid, now a man, bilingual in both Egyptian and Hebrew, can on longer hold back his charade before his eleven brothers as a native-born Egyptian, number two only to Pharaoh, and reveals himself to them, probably by showing he is circumcised. His brother Judah gets extreme and perhaps illogical, just before, saying he refuses to fetch father Jacob, renamed Israel, from the famine in Canaan if brother Benjamin cannot go back with the ten other brothers, future tribes of Israel. To do so would just kill their father from grief of losing a second son, since Jacob thought he lost Joseph, years earlier.

Jacob just can't hardly believe the good news tht Joseph is still alive and a lord of Egypt until God personally reassures him in a night vision. He sees the ten wagons from Egypt and is told not to worry about bringing his diminishing wealth he thought he'd have to completely sell off to survive the famine.

I am calling this new year a Year of Grace, rather than Year of the Dragon. I have noticed how I am very hard on myself. In fact, my greatest trial of 2011 was with my boss at work. My greatest blessing was meeting my psychologist, Doc Penewit. My greatest lesson of 2011 is not to hold all my worries and bitterness in, but to vent, as he calls it, before I had a volcanic eruption, so to speak, by speaking to my wife, or to him or to God about my self-condemnation, or bitterness at being understood.

I relate to what Israel said to Pharaoh: how much worse he was than his father. Jacob or Israel had a pessimistic inferiority complex he displayed when Pharaoh got wind that the father of his right-hand man, the foreigner Joseph, had just arrived in Egypt with his whole family.

Genesis 47:9 says, Jacob said to Pharaoh, “All the years of my travels are 130. All the years of my life have been few and painful; the years of my travels are not as long as those of my ancestors.” He focused on comparing himself to his father and grandfather Abraham, who lived longer, and on his pain, yet he got the best land in Egypt. I am sure God will work it out for you, even when your attention is diverted to your pain or inferiority.

Don't give up. God has a surprise up his sleeve to you to turn this around. Even if you has to pay 20% tax like the laity of Egypt, GOD WILL STILL PULL YOU THROUGH.